Land Ho!

Five days without land will make even the smallest island interesting. Tutoring my students in office hours, I was interrupted by the loudspeakers, which informed us that the captain had intentionally gone off course for us to have the opportunity to see the Azores islands. In the first picture: some students admiring the land. According to wikipedia, the Azorean islands are "abour 1,500 km (950 mi) from Lisbon and about 3,900 km (2,400 mi) from the east coast of North America."

A note on the students: these are some of the most hard-working kids I've ever had. A few of them have met with me in office hours every day to be sure they understand the homework. A couple days in a row, I must have had about 10 students surrounding me to get help in the Piano Lounge outside the cafeteria, leading another professor to suggest to me that maybe I should slow my class down. But this professor hasn't seen the results: many of the students have never spoken Spanish in class before, and some have never taken a class of Spanish at all (NOT the prerequisites for my course). They have completed four chapters in six days, they are now all speaking Spanish in class and acting out plays depicting possible scenarios they will encounter in Spain. In one class, when I asked how many students wanted to go shopping in Cádiz to practice their clothing vocabulary half of my first class raised their hands.

(On the other end of the spectrum, I have a native speaker in my Intermediate Spanish course. Señorita keeps explaining she wants the class to learn the grammar, but laughs at other students or rolls her eyes when they say something wrong. At UVa, this girl never would have been allowed in my class, but she sneaked by on the first day, and became permanent after ADD/DROP was over. This is an wide range of students.)